Fifty-two

Fifty-two

Galleri Christinegaard, BERGEN i samarbeid med Vigdis Fjellheim

What happens when two artists bring 52 paintings together into a single, shared work?

Over the course of a year, Vigdis Fjellheim and I worked in parallel on the project Fifty-two, each producing 26 paintings in a predetermined format—without sharing our processes along the way. It wasn’t until three days before the opening that our works met for the very first time.

The exhibition space became a laboratory—a site for intense exploration, where we assembled the paintings into a unified installation. The works were restructured and recontextualized, driven by a search for connections, contrasts, and unexpected relationships.

The project challenged notions of authorship, control, and habitual working methods. What happens when you relinquish authority over your own context? When your work must be viewed in relation to another artist’s visual language and rhythm? How do new meanings emerge through unpredictable encounters between images?

The result was an installation that appeared as a singular whole—a total work that neither of us could have envisioned beforehand. Fifty-two became more than an exhibition; it was a live negotiation between two practices, two perspectives, and 52 paintings.

Photo: Pål Hoff, Vigdis Fjellheim, Torunn Skjelland